Monday, July 12, 2010

Nuns and the World

Sisters Contribute to the New Evangelization Across the Country

In their small chapel in Kansas City, Kan., the voices of the Little Sisters of the Lamb enfold their visitors within the Psalms they sing. The harmony of their voices lifted in prayer spills from the open windows and to settles on their neighbors who daily reap the benefits of the sisters living among them.

To the uninitiated, the prayer of the sisters brings a jolt to the soul with an urgency and a peace that seems out of the place in the inner-city neighborhood in which the sisters live. In the short time they have been here, they have become friends with many in the area and have been taken on the building of the first North American monastery of the Little Sisters of the Lamb.

In a time when vocations appear to be declining, signs of the vitality appear in some unlikely places. The Little Sisters’ presence in the Kansas City exemplifies the answer to the call of Vatican II for religious orders to rediscover their roots and for the faithful to participate in a New Evangelization.

The Little Sisters of the Lamb in their blue habits hail from the Poland, France, Austria and Luxembourg and bring with them a lifestyle radical by any standard. Founded in France by Little Sister Marie, the community espouses a life of contemplative prayer and the poverty . A branch of the Dominican order, the community has Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, a fellow of Dominican, as its bishop protector.

The sisters came to Kansas City at the invitation of the Archbishop Joseph Naumann who encountered their community in Rome. Archbishop Naumann believes that the effectiveness of their ministry flows from their poverty, which requires them to go out and beg for their daily bread and, in the process, they share the Gospel with those they meet.

“By coming in the poverty, many people welcome them,” the archbishop said. “Their strong and beautiful prayer of life sustains them in living out this radical poverty.”